Tuesday, January 8, 2013

NASA Plan: Place Asteroid in Lunar Orbit

NASA might lasso an asteroid and drag it to orbit near moon

Wild $2.6 billion plan that could help humans land on Mars someday is being considered

Rick Sternbach / Keck Institute for Space Studies

An artist's illustration of an asteroid retrieval spacecraft capturing a 500-ton asteroid that is about 7 meters wide.

By Mike Wall

Capturing a near-Earth asteroid and dragging it into orbit
around the moon could help humanity put boots on Mars someday,
proponents of the idea say.

NASA is considering a $2.6 billion asteroid-retrieval mission that
could deliver a space rock to high lunar orbit by 2025 or so, New Scientist reported
last week. The plan could help jump-start manned exploration of deep
space, carving out a path to the Red Planet and perhaps even more
far-flung destinations, its developers maintain.

"Experience gained via human expeditions to the small returned NEA
would transfer directly to follow-on international expeditions beyond
the Earth-moon system: to other near-Earth asteroids,
(the Mars moons) Phobos and Deimos, Mars and potentially someday to the
main asteroid belt," the mission concept team, which is based at the
Keck Institute for Space Studies in California, wrote in a feasibility
study of the plan last year.